You know that feeling when you check your Twitter followers to see who’s following you back? Now imagine doing that for your GitHub account. It’s… surprisingly addictive. And it reveals something most developers ignore: GitHub is a social network wearing a code repository’s clothes.
You’ve probably tried using those CLI tools that spit out raw lists. Or signed up for some third-party app that still hits the same 5,000 request wall. Frustrating, right? Large accounts like Evan You? Forget it. You’re stuck with an incomplete picture.
That’s exactly what one developer realized. He just wanted to know if a person he followed on GitHub followed him back. Or if that star came from someone who actually cared about his work. Simple curiosity. But every tool he found was either useless at scale or required a sign-up. So he built his own.
But here’s the twist: he didn’t just create another raw list. He wanted to see the link—the thing we all have in common. Countries. So he built a map. A global map of your GitHub network.
That’s GitCharta. Type in any GitHub username, and it generates a heatmap of where your followers and following actually live. Suddenly, the open-source world stops being a flat list of usernames. It becomes a living, breathing map of human connections. You’re not just looking at code. You’re looking at a community scattered across continents.
Of course, building it wasn’t easy. The first challenge: GitHub’s location field is raw text. People write ‘San Francisco’, ‘SF’, ‘California’, or just ‘🚀’. The creator wrote a custom geocoder in TypeScript to translate that mess into country codes—without relying on heavy external APIs.
The second challenge: scaling. GitHub’s GraphQL API sometimes returns wrong or missing data. So he used the REST API as a fallback. A hybrid approach that’s smart, not brute-force. The best engineering isn’t about choosing one tool—it’s knowing when to cheat with another.
No signup. No hidden fees. The Personal Access Token is optional. Just drop in a username and hit go. It’s the kind of tool that makes you wonder: why didn’t anyone do this before? Because most developers still think of GitHub as a code repository. But the data is screaming at us: it’s a social network. And now you can see it.
Try it. Put in your own username. Look at the map. You might discover that your biggest fan lives on the other side of the world. Or that half your followers are in a country you’ve never visited. The open-source community is more connected than you think. And it’s all on a map.
FAQ
Q: Does this tool store my data?
A: No. GitCharta runs entirely in your browser. Your Personal Access Token (if you provide one) is only used to fetch data from GitHub's API—it's never saved or sent anywhere else.
Q: What's the practical use of a GitHub network map?
A: Beyond satisfying curiosity, it helps you understand your actual reach in the open-source community. You can spot geographic clusters of contributors, identify which regions follow your work, and even discover potential collaborators you didn't know existed.
Q: Why not just use GitHub's own API for this?
A: GitHub's REST API has a 5,000 request per hour limit, and GraphQL can return incomplete data. GitCharta's hybrid approach uses GraphQL for speed and falls back to REST for reliability—letting you map accounts with tens of thousands of followers without hitting a wall.